Why Congress Doesnt Work

Published

2 years ago

March 17, 2023

admin

Control of the House of Representatives could teeter precariously for years as each party consolidates its dominance over mirror-image demographic strongholds.

Thats the clearest conclusion of a new analysis of the demographic and economic characteristics of all 435 congressional districts, conducted by the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California in conjunction with The Atlantic.

Based on census data, the analysis finds that Democrats now hold a commanding edge over the GOP in seats where the share of residents who are nonwhite, the share of white adults with a college degree, or both, are higher than the level in the nation overall. But Republicans hold a lopsided lead in the districts where the share of racial minorities and whites with at least a four-year college degree are both lower than the national leveland that is the largest single bloc of districts in the House.

This demographic divide has produced a near-partisan stalemate, with Republicans in the new Congress holding the same narrow 222-seat majority that Democrats had in the last one. Both sides will struggle to build a much bigger majority without demonstrating more capacity to win seats whose demographic and economic profile has mostly favored the other. The coalitions are quite stretched to their limits, so there is just not a lot of space for expansion, says Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the political-reform program at New America.

The widening chasm between the characteristics of the districts held by each party has left the House not only closely divided, but also deeply divided.

Through the late 20th and early 21st centuries, substantial overlap remained between the kinds of districts each party held. In those years, large numbers of Democrats still represented mostly white, low-income rural and small-town districts with few college graduates, and a cohort of Republicans held well-educated, affluent suburban districts. That overlap didnt prevent the House from growing more partisan and confrontational, but it did temper that trend, because the small-town blue dog Democrats and suburban gypsy moth Republicans were often the members open to working across party lines.

Now the parties represent districts more consistently divided along lines of demography, economic status, and geography, which makes finding common ground difficult. The parties intensifying separation is a recipe for polarization, Manuel Pastor, a sociology professor at USC and the director of the Equity Research Institute, told me.

To understand the social and economic characteristics of the House seats held by each party, Jeffer Giang and Justin Scoggins of the Equity Research Institute analyzed five-year summary results through 2020 from the Census Bureaus American Community Survey.

The analysis revealed that along every key economic and demographic dimension, the two parties are now sorted to the extreme in the House districts they represent. These people are coming to Washington not from different districts, but frankly different planets, says former Representative Steve Israel, who chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Among the key distinctions:

*More than three-fifths of House Democrats hold districts where the share of the nonwhite population exceeds the national level of 40 percent. Four-fifths of House Republicans hold districts in which the minority share of the population is below the national level.

*Nearly three-fourths of House Democrats represent districts where the share of white adults with a college degree exceeds the national level of 36 percent. More than three-fourths of Republicans hold districts where the share of white college graduates trails the national level.

*Just over three-fifths of House Democrats hold districts where the share of immigrants exceeds the national level of 14 percent; well over four-fifths of House Republicans hold districts with fewer immigrants than average.

*Perhaps most strikingly, three-fifths of Democrats now hold districts where the median income exceeds the national level of nearly $65,000; more than two-thirds of Republicans hold districts where the median income falls beneath the national level.

Sorting congressional districts by racial diversity and education produces the four quadrants of Congress: districts with high levels of racial diversity and white education (hi-hi districts), districts with high levels of racial diversity and low levels of white education (hi-lo districts), districts with low levels of diversity and high levels of white education (lo-hi districts), and districts with low levels of diversity and white education (lo-lo districts). (The analysis focuses on the education level among whites, and not the entire population, because education is a more significant difference in the political behavior of white voters than of minority groups.)

Read: The GOPs control of congress is only getting stronger

Looking at the House through that lens shows that the GOP has become enormously dependent on one type of seat: the lo-lo districts revolving around white voters without a college degree. Republicans hold 142 districts in that category (making up nearly two-thirds of the partys House seats), compared with just 21 for Democrats.

The intense Republican reliance on this single type of mostly white, blue-collar district helps explain why the energy in the party over recent years has shifted from the small-government arguments that drove the GOP in the Reagan era toward the unremitting culture-war focus pursued by Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Many of the most militantly conservative House Republicans represent these lo-lo districtsa list that includes Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania.

The right accuses the left of identity politics, when the analysis of this data suggests that identity politics has become the core of the Republican Party, Pastor told me.

House Democrats are not nearly as reliant on seats from any one of the four quadrants. Apart from the lo-lo districts, they lead the GOP in the other three groupings. Democrats hold a narrow 3730 lead over Republicans in the seats with high levels of diversity and few white college graduates (the hi-lo districts). These seats include many prominent Democrats representing predominantly minority areas, including Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, Terri Sewell of Alabama, and Ruben Gallego of Arizona. At the same time, these districts have been a source of growth for Republicans: The current Democratic lead of seven seats is way down from the partys 28-seat advantage in 2009.

Democrats hold a more comfortable 5735 edge in the lo-hi districts with fewer minorities and a higher share of white adults with college degrees than average. These are the mostly white-collar districts represented by leading suburban Democrats, many of them moderates, such as Angie Craig of Minnesota, Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, Sharice Davids of Kansas, and Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey. A large share of the House Republicans considered more moderate also represent districts in this bloc.

The core of Democratic strength in the House is the hi-hi districts that combine elevated levels of both racial minorities and college-educated whites. Democrats hold 98 of the 113 House seats in this category. Many of the partys most visible members represent seats fitting this description, including former Speaker Nancy Pelosi; the current House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries; former House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff; and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. These are also the strongholds for Democrats representing what Pastor calls the places where diversity is increasing the most: inner suburbs in major metropolitan areas. Among the members representing those sorts of constituencies are Lucy McBath of Georgia, Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, and Ro Khanna and Zoe Lofgren of California.

Though Democrats are not as dependent on any single quadrantas Republicans are on the low-diversity, low-education districts, each party over the past decade has been forced to retreat into its demographic citadel. As Drutman notes, thats the result of a succession of wave elections that has culled many of the members from each side who had earlier survived in districts demographically and economically trending toward the other.

The first victims were the so-called blue-dog Democrats, who had held on to lo-lo districts long after they flipped to mostly backing Republican presidential candidates. Those Democrats from rural and small-town areas, many of them in the South, had started declining in the 90s. Still, as late as 2009, during the first Congress of Barack Obamas presidency, Republicans held only 20 more seats than Democrats did in the lo-lo quadrant. Democrats from those districts composed almost as large a share of the total party caucus in that Congress as did members from the hi-hi districts.

But the 2010 Tea Party landslide virtually exterminated the blue dogs. After that election, the GOP edge in the lo-lo districts exploded to 90 seats; it reached 125 seats after redistricting and further GOP gains in the 2014 election. Today the districts low in diversity and white-education levels account for just one in 10 of all House Democratic seats, and the hi-hi seats make up nearly half. The seats low in diversity and high in white education (about one-fourth) and those high in diversity and low in white education (about one-sixth), provide the remainder.

For House Republicans, losses in the 2018 midterms represented the demographic bookend to their blue-collar, small-town gains in 2010. In 2018, Democrats, powered by white-collar antipathy toward Trump, swept away a long list of House Republicans who had held on to well-educated suburban districts that had been trending away from the GOP at the presidential level since Bill Clintons era.

Today, districts with a higher share of white college graduates than the nation overall account for less than one-fourth of all GOP seats, down from one-third in 2009. The heavily blue-collar lo-lo districts have grown from just over half of the GOP conference in 2009 to their current level of nearly two-thirds. (The share of Republicans in seats with more minorities and fewer white college graduates than average has remained constant since 2009, at about one in seven.)

Each party is pushing an economic agenda that collides with the immediate economic interests of a large portion of its voters. The party leadership has not caught up with the coalitions, says former Representative Tom Davis, who served as chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

For years, some progressives have feared that Democrats would back away from a populist economic agenda if the party grew more reliant on affluent voters. That shift has certainly occurred, with Democrats now holding 128 of the 198 House districts where the median income exceeds the national level. But the party has continued to advocate for a redistributionist economic agenda that seeks higher taxes on upper-income adults to fund expanded social programs for working-class families, as proposed in President Joe Bidens latest budget. The one concession to the new coalition reality is that Democrats now seek to exempt from higher taxes families earning up to $400,000a level that earlier generations of Democrats probably would have considered much too high.

Republicans face more dissonance between their reconfigured coalition and their agenda. Though the GOP holds 152 of the 237 districts where the median income trails the national level, the party continues to champion big cuts in domestic social programs that benefit low-income families while pushing tax cuts that mostly flow toward the wealthy and corporations. As former Democratic Representative David Price, now a visiting fellow at Duke Universitys Sanford School of Public Policy, says, there is a pretty profound disconnect between the GOPs economic agenda and the economic deprivation and what you would think would be a pretty clear set of needs of the districts the party represents.

Each of these seeming contradictions underscores how cultural affinity has displaced economic interest as the most powerful glue binding each sides coalition. Republicans like Davis lament that their party can no longer win culturally liberal suburban voters by warning that Democrats will raise their taxes; Democrats like Price express frustration that their party cant win culturally conservative rural voters by portraying Republicans as threats to Social Security and Medicare.

The advantage for Republicans in this new alignment is that there are still many more seats where whites exceed their share of the national population than seats with more minorities than average. Likewise, the number of seats with fewer white college graduates than the nation overall exceeds the number with more.

That probably gives Republicans a slight advantage in the struggle for House control over the next few years. Of the 22 House seats that the nonpartisan Cook Political Report currently rates as toss-ups or leaning toward the other party in 2024, for instance, 14 have fewer minorities than average and 12 have fewer white college graduates. On the wedge issues, a lot of the swing districts look a little bit more like Republican districts than Democratic districts, says Drutman, whose own recent analysis of House districts used an academic polling project to assess attitudes in all 435 seats.

But as Pastor points out, Republicans are growing more dependent on those heavily white and non-college-educated districts as society overall is growing more diverse and better educated, especially in younger generations. Its hard to see how the Republicans can grow their coalition, Pastor told me, with the militant culture-war messages they are using to cement their current coalition.

Davis, the former NRCC chair, also worries that the GOP is relying too much on squeezing bigger margins from shrinking groups. The way out of that trap, he argues, is for Republicans to continue advancing from the beachheads they have established in recent years among more culturally conservative voters of color, especially Latino men.

Read: Are latinos really realigning toward Republicans?

But Republicans may struggle to make sufficient gains with those voters to significantly shift the balance of power in the House: Though the party last year improved among Latinos in Florida, the results in Arizona, Nevada, and even Texas showed the GOP still facing substantial barriers. The Trump-era GOP also continues to face towering resistance in well-educated areas, which limits any potential recovery there: In 2020, Biden, stunningly, carried more than four-fifths of the House districts where the share of college-educated white adults exceeds the national level. Conversely, despite Bidens emphasis on delivering tangible economic benefits to working families, Democrats still faced enormous deficits with blue-collar white voters in the midterms. With many of its most vulnerable members defending such working-class terrain, Democrats could lose even more of those seats in 2024.

Constrained by these offsetting dynamics, neither party appears well positioned to break into a clear lead in the House. The two sides look more likely to remain trapped in a grinding form of electoral trench warfare in which they control competing bands of districts that are almost equal in number, but utterly antithetical in their demographic, economic, and ideological profile.

Politics

Crypto influencers are replacing VCs, and that’s a good thing

Published

5 hours ago

August 9, 2025

admin

Crypto influencers are replacing VCs, and that’s a good thing

Crypto influencers democratize early-stage investing by offering transparent, accessible opportunities that VCs keep behind closed doors for the elite.

Environment

Kingbull Jumper Go: The versatile, high-speed eBike built for any terrain

Published

6 hours ago

August 9, 2025

admin

Kingbull Jumper Go: The versatile, high-speed eBike built for any terrain

The eBike space is crowded in 2025, but the Kingbull Jumper Go stands out with a rare combination of features: a compact 20” frame, full suspension, a step-through design, and a powerful Class 3 motor capable of hitting high speeds. Whether you’re commuting through the city, riding off-road trails, or just looking for a versatile, approachable ride, the Jumper Go delivers serious performance, especially for the price.

Key specs

On paper, the Kingbull Jumper Go has all the hardware you would want and need for its size and price. It blends commuter-friendly features with the components you’d expect from more premium off-road eBikes. These specs on paper translate to real-world use amazingly. Here’s a quick rundown of the key specs:

Motor: 750W Bafang rear hub motor
Top Speed: 28 MPH with pedal assist (up to 40 MPH unlocked; check local laws)
Battery: 48V 20Ah Samsung removable battery
Max Range: Up to 80 miles per charge
Gearing: Shimano 8-speed drivetrain
Brakes: Tektro hydraulic disc brakes
Suspension: Front 80mm fork + rear mid-frame air shock
Tires: 20” x 4.0” Kenda fat tires (puncture-resistant)
Frame: Step-through aluminum frame with internal cable routing
Display: Integrated LED display with speed, assist level, and battery status
Lighting: Integrated 48V headlight and rear brake light
Included Accessories: Rear cargo rack, full fenders, mini tool kit, zip ties, tire pump

Together, these features make the Kingbull Jumper Go a rare all-in-one package: powerful, approachable, and ready to handle daily commutes and adventures without compromise.

Real-world experience

I have been living with the Kingbull Jumper Go for two weeks now and have been using it as my daily driver. I have used it for pretty much everything, from small grocery runs, to running a quick errand, to just taking me from place to place. Here is what you need to know.

Advertisement – scroll for more content

The setup

The setup was surprisingly simple. The bike has everything needed for assembly, including a mini tool kit, zip ties, and even a tire pump. The Kingbull Jumper Go comes about 80% pre-assembled, with the rear tire and monitor intact. I had to install the front tire, front fender, handlebar, headlight, and seat. Assembly took roughly 20 minutes, and I am someone who does not do this often. It was great that I did not need any of my own tools to get the bike ready. The final thing I did was ensure it was fully charged before getting on it.

The ride

On the road, the 750W motor gives you quick acceleration and plenty of torque, easily handling hills and the urban terrain I live in. The five levels of pedal assist and throttle control give you full flexibility in how much effort you want to put in. I got the bike to almost 30mph with the pedal assist and to 22mph using the throttle. The suspension system, which features an 80mm front fork and a rear mid-air shock, makes city potholes and light off-road trails smooth and manageable.

I live in New Jersey, and if you know anything about our roads, they are terribly maintained and have potholes everywhere. The Kingbull Jumper Go kept the ride very smooth and managed those potholes perfectly. I also took it through some gravel roads, trails, and through some wet terrain, and it was great. The fat tires gives you a strong sense of confidence both on road and when you are dealing with a more challenging terrain.

The design

The step-through frame is especially helpful for beginners and for riders who are sharing this bike with someone who is a different height. The step-through frame also makes it easy to dismount or quickly react by easily putting your feet down without feeling like you are going to tip over.

The 20” Kenda fat tires provide great traction and comfort on surfaces ranging from pavement to grass and gravel. The Tektro hydraulic brakes are responsive and reliable, offering solid control even at higher speeds. You also get a fantastic LED display with real-time speed, distance traveled, and battery life. It is also plenty bright, so the display is easily visible even in the brightest conditions.

After riding this for two weeks in both urban and off-road settings, the Kingbull Jumper Go proved to be equally capable as a commuter eBike, urban cruiser, and all-terrain bike. Its compact frame makes it easier to handle and store compared to larger full-size fat-tire bikes, but without compromising on performance.

Kingbull Jumper Go Pricing and availability

The Kingbull Jumper Go is currently available through Kingbull’s official website for just under $1,699. However, they have a limited-time summer promotion offering $100 OFF with code Electrek, bringing the price down to $1,599. That discount makes it one of the best values on the market for a full-suspension, Class 3 fat-tire eBike. Kingbull’s 2-year warranty also backs it and offers local test ride availability in California, giving potential buyers added peace of mind and confidence in the brand.

Check out the Kingbull Jumper Go today!

[embedded content]

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.

Environment

I bought a 30 MPH electric jet boat from China. Here’s what showed up

Published

6 hours ago

August 9, 2025

admin

I bought a 30 MPH electric jet boat from China. Here's what showed up

Yep, I did it again. I bought something weird and crazy from China. It’s a mini electric jet boat. “What’s a mini electric jet boat?” you might be asking. Think: comically small one-seater boat with an electrically powered jet ski drivetrain.

Basically, I plopped down a not insignificant amount of money online and then crossed my fingers. Here’s what happened next.

Firstly, this is kind of par for the course for me. If you’ve been following my writing for any significant period of time, you’ll have learned two things about me. I like e-bikes and I like buying weird electric vehicles from China that I don’t need. It’s a problem, I know. I’m going to get help one day. But that day is not today.

Because today I’ve got a new electric jet boat. You can see my unboxing and testing video of this aquatic miracle here, or keep reading below for the full story of how this happened.

Advertisement – scroll for more content

I hate that I have to clarify this, but the trolls can see these are all adults building these boats

So here’s how it went. I’ve spent years writing a mostly-weekly column on the fun and weird Alibaba electric vehicles I find in my time-wasting window-shopping searches. A couple of years ago, one of them was a mini electric jet boat. And I’ve wanted one ever since.

So I started researching factories in China that build these things and talked to a number of them. Some seemed fairly new. Others seemed like fronts or merely trading companies. And they all seemed pretty shady. But this isn’t my first rodeo and so I chose the one that seemed the least risky and started talking details. I use a Chinese messaging service similar to WhatsApp that makes it a lot easier to communicate with the factories, and the lovely girl who works their sales office showed me several models and features. Together, we worked through the details and specs until I had planned out basically what I wanted.

Then it came time to pay.

This is always the scariest part and so I wired to China more money than a bad idea should cost. Over there, it’s common to do a 30% down payment and 70% balance payment upon completion, so that’s what I offered. I’m glad I did because production took several months longer than I expected, and I was starting to get worried, but fortunately, the factory was sending me fairly regular pictures and video updates of progress, which was comforting. After a few months, my order was finally ready, and so they packaged it up and shipped it off to me.

I’m not sure what Christmas morning feels like, but I bet it’s something like this

I should also mention that while I normally use FOB (free on board) or CIF (cost, insurance, freight) terms for these kinds of deals where I get some new toy in from China, this particular case was a bit riskier, and so I went with DDP (delivered duty paid) terms. The two former options leave most of the work on me to ship and import the thing, while the last option means the seller basically handles everything until there’s a janky wooden crate dropped in my driveway. DDP terms are always more expensive, and many factories don’t want to mess with it since it leaves most of the work of shipping and importing on the seller or their freight forwarder, which I preferred in this case.

This was also before all the new Trump tariffs this year, and so duties were much lower (somewhere around 27-28% total, I believe. Now they are probably 2-3x that much).

But with all of the work of actually dealing with getting the thing now finished, it was time to crack open the box. Inside was my shiny blue electric jet boat! I had it shipped to my parents’ place in Florida because they have a decently large pond where I could test it. There I got it open and hauled it back to the pond in what else but my electric mini truck that I bought from China nearly four years ago. It has since lived a loving but not easy life as a farm truck, and this isn’t even one of the weirdest things that has graced its bed in the last few years.

Technically, there’s that second hump on the seat for a (brave) second rider

The little boat is so small that it actually fits nicely in the little bed of my mini-truck, and it was a great example of why I even wanted this thing to begin with: it’s small enough to fit in a car, so you can take it to the lake or ocean without needing a boat trailer.

Even a jet-ski needs a trailer, but you could take this little vessel to the shore with a kayak rack on your Tesla, or even on a decent car! Just kidding, I don’t even own a car… unless you count that mini-truck that I gave to my parents.

At the pond I dropped the boat down onto the grass, dragged it the last bit of the way down the bank and splashed it right into the drink. From there, I just needed to plop the 5 kWh LiFePO4 battery into the underseat compartment and I was ready to go.

There were no instructions, so it took me a couple of minutes to figure out the right combination of buttons to push and key turns to actually start it up, but from the first push of the accelerator, I knew this thing was wild!

Catch a wave and you’re sitting on top of the world…

It was supposed to be just over 30 mph capable (50 km/h or 27 knots), but the pond is only around 300 feet long and so the opposite bank comes at you mighty fast. I think I only got it up to around half its top speed because 1) I didn’t want to run aground, and 2) I was legitimately scared to go faster.

The boat comes with these weird stainless steel mounts on the side, and it turns out they are for this ridiculous looking inflatable bumper thing that reminds me of a big toilet seat. I didn’t install it because I hate how it ruins the sleek look of the boat. But I instantly discovered why they designed it, since the jet boat feels horribly unstable at slow speeds. As soon as you turn sharply and let off the throttle at slow speeds, you start heeling over significantly. It’s a very uncomfortable feeling since you’re sitting at the water line and feel like you’re going to be thrown out of the boat. The ballast of the huge battery sitting so low, plus whatever actual ballast they build into these things, probably means you won’t really capsize. But it sure feels like you’re going for a swim soon.

Turning at speed is much nicer, but if you’re not yet planing (going fast enough to rise out of the water and glide over the surface instead of just floating due to water displacement), it just feels like you’re going to rock yourself right out in a turn. The boat was obviously designed to handle at high speeds, not low speeds. It doesn’t have the wide beam of a jet ski for stability, so that inflatable toilet seat gives it low-speed stability.

But alas, I just couldn’t bring myself to install the nautical version of training wheels on that beautiful thing, so I pushed through it and just kept it at fairly high speeds in the pond. It was a blast, and with my dad there watching me, I was excited to give him a turn too.

Oh, I forgot to mention, I actually bought two of them.

With my dad’s boat unboxed, we both got in our own mini jet boats and had a blast ripping high-speed loops around his backyard pond.

These things are insanely powerful for what feels like a stubby kayak when you sit inside it, and the performance gives you an ear to grin.

Just be prepared for your face to turn to terror the first time you let off the throttle too abruptly and take a sharp turn.

As fun as they were though, we still weren’t even past half way down on the accelerator pedal, and so I knew that a larger body of water was going to be in our future.

Dad and I acting like a couple of kids in our mini jet boats!

These are motorized vessels and so they require registration to use them in public waterways in most states. It’s not like a kayak or canoe where you can just put in anywhere and pretty much be alright with the law. And in Florida, where the state makes a lot of its money from its waterways, they actually enforce this stuff.

I imagine I can get the boats properly registered with hull numbers for use in public waterways, but for expediency’s sake, I set my sights on a big private lake in a local eco-friendly planned community. The cool thing is that these huge lakes are off-limits to combustion engine watercraft, which means they’re basically only for kayakers and canoers, or the rare person who has an electric boat.

I’m a rare person.

So with the entire lake empty, I brought my jet boat over in the back of my family’s car and put in at the kayak dock.

If you watched my video above, you’ll already know how that went (complete with Beach Boys-style song montage). But for those who prefer to read instead of watching an awesome little jet boat rocket around a big lake, just know that it was an absolute riot. The mini electric jet boat is insanely fast and skipped the glassy surface of the pond like a pebble with a rocket engine on it.

Of course, the surface didn’t stay glassy long with the massive wake I was sending out, and that meant soon I was getting airborne, hopping my own wake while pulling tight figure eights.

With around 25 minutes of boating and filming, I had dropped the battery from 100% to 70%. Despite the high power, that big battery was impressively lasting!

The whole experience proved to me how right I was about the convenience of this boat format. This whole exploit was simple, a word that is almost never used when discussing boat ownership. To get to the water, I simply loaded the boat in the back of the car and then used a cheap Amazon kayak trailer to waddle it the 100 feet or so from the parking lot to the dock. The boat is still quite heavy – I’d guess at least 150 lb (70 kg) or so. But lifting one side at a time is doable by one dude, and the kayak trailer made it easy enough to move on my own across land.

There was no boat trailer necessary. No searching for a boat ramp. No hoping to stay off of Miami Boat Ramp YouTube channels lampooning people who don’t know what they’re doing with a trailer, etc. It was the boating experience of a jet-ski meets the ownership experience of a kayak.

For anyone who lives along the water, this would be an amazing toy to own. There are so many people with lakefront property who could have their own mini electric boat to tool around on whenever they want. Or if you live close to the coast, you could keep the boat in the garage with a kayak hoist and just drive it on down to the coast for fun. These things practically sell themselves. Cheaper than an electric surfboard and nearly as portable.

Yes, this one is photoshopped. It’s a real shot, but I swapped out the brown tannin lake water for nice blue sea water

Which brings me to cost. I ended up paying around $5,500 for each boat, which is a lot to risk on this stuff, with only a hope that it would work out and that I could make some of the money back on my video and writing. And if you’re thinking, “Wow, this guy plopped down $11k on this stuff,” then I have two things to tell you. First, a Jet Ski would have cost more and been a huge hassle. And two, I didn’t spend $11k; I spent a lot more.

In fact, I couldn’t stop myself at the time (and considered it something of a business expense – hey, I’m working right now, people!), so it turns out that I actually bought three of these things. I know this sounds like an excuse, but it just made sense with how much shipping was already costing me! I mean, c’mon – I couldn’t afford not to.

Though I still have the third one in the crate and I’ll probably end up selling it new in box, if someone wants to find my email and make me an offer.

That also means I have two boats that I plan to keep, and I need names for them. Please hit me with your suggestions in the comment section. One of my subscribers suggested an absolute banger of a name with Sunny Side Up for my yellow and white solar-powered Chinese electric pleasure boat, and that’s what I went with.

Well, I *did* already say that I know I have a problem

Now I will say that as fun as these things are, they aren’t perfect. One of the boats arrived with its bilge pump motor always running due to a faulty float switch (oh yeah, they even have a bilge pump!). The factory also told me that they couldn’t install real cleats through the hull, though at least they did give me a bow eye that helps with tying it up.

I’ve technically been sitting on this story for a year, and I can tell you that after a year of living out in the Florida elements, one of the boat’s paint is a bit cracked near the hinges of the seat where it gets stressed from lifting the seat up to remove the battery.

The boats are also surprisingly loud. These are the loudest EVs I’ve ever seen, and I thought the F-150 Lightning was loud! A neighbor has one and I once remarked that it sounded like a jet turbine in the summer because of all its fans running, but now I know what an EV with an actual jet turbine sounds like, or at least a water jet turbine. To be more accurate, it’s not the boat that’s loud, but rather the cavitating water inside the jet turbine that is constantly screaming as its vacuum cavities repeatedly expand and collapse as they shoot out the back of the boat’s vectored thrust nozzle. It sounds like a wet, angry bat out of hell. A guy watching me from the shore of the lake actually asked if it was a two-stroke! So don’t think this is going to be a silent boat. The motor is silent, but the shooting water is loud.

Then there’s the battery. It weighs nearly 80 pounds and you have to pull the battery out to charge it – you can’t leave it in the boat and charge it since the charge and discharge port are one and the same.

I also burned out one of the chargers when I accidentally let the charger tip fall on some wet grass while it was plugged in. Poof. The magic smoke was out of the charger, and it wasn’t going back in. I’ll have to find another 84V charger and solder this massive and unique charging connector onto its output wire.

Speaking of the chargers, they are 2,500-watt chargers. They’ll impressively fill the batteries in just over two hours, but they are so powerful that they won’t run on any normal household 120V outlet. I got lucky that my dad’s garage had an RV outlet with a 30A breaker; otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to use the charger.

But downsides aside, the rest of the experience was incredible! I love these things! They’re just so much fun, and they bring a smile to everyone’s face. Since I bought them a year ago, I’m seeing many more options on Alibaba for other factories starting to make and sell mini jet boats. I can all but guarantee you that within a year or two, there will be people re-selling mini jet boats in the US. Just make sure you go with a reputable company that has done its homework and can stand behind these things. A couple of years ago, I started an electric tractor company based on making a long list of improvements to what was originally a German-designed and Chinese-produced electric loader. We developed it (and subsequent models) into our own new design, offer full warranties, and keep a US warehouse stocked with replacement parts. That’s the only way to do business right, so don’t get hosed a few months from now by some fly-by-night company that read this article and then thought it would be a good idea to start hawking Chinese mini jet boats in the US. These things are quite rough around the edges (literally and figuratively) and would take some significant work to make them safe and reliable for a Western market.

And in the same vein, I don’t actually recommend anyone try and buy one of these from China, either. There’s just too much risk and too big a chance that you’ll get ripped off in the end, or you’ll get bent over a shipping container by customs and end up paying several times the purchase price in shipping and import fees.

I don’t have any plans to import and sell these, largely because of the liability (imagine how much I pay in business liability insurance just to run a tractor company) and the fact that there are too many design changes I’d need to make to turn it into something I’d be proud to stand behind and put my name on. I mostly go on these real-life Alibaba escapades because 1) I enjoy testing the weird and fun things you can find in a country that has certain product safety and manufacturing advantages compared to the West (i.e. less of the first and more of the second), and 2) so that I can share these experiences with my audience, most of whom will never have the ability to try these things themselves.

But hey, as a neat toy for my parents’ pond and the local lakes or Gulf of Mexico fun days, these are going to be perfect for us!